How Do You Tell When a Politician is Lying? (His Lips Are Moving, and Moving, and Moving.)

Two days after he was caught sending his now-immortal erotic selfies to much-younger women on Twitter, then-Congressman Anthony Weiner was confronted by a scrum of reporters in a hallway. He refused to answer their simple questions, but he also just couldn't seem to stop talking. When three minutes and fourteen seconds of beside-the-point jabbering failed to satisfy the journalists, Weiner tried profanity. It just tightened the noose.

Back then, you might have thought you were merely watching the spectacular implosion of a political career. You were, sort of, but, as it turns out Weiner was also exhibiting at least two signs of lying recently pinpointed by researchers at Harvard Business School.

In an experiment straight out of reality TV, researchers paired off subjects in a lab and gave one of them—the allocator—money in denominations ranging from $5 to $50. The allocator then had to offer some portion of the handout to the second subject, the recipient. Those who attempted to keep more money than their fair share by lying about the amount they'd gotten, the researchers found, used far more words when trying to explain themselves. Researchers dubbed this the "Pinocchio Effect."

"They'll add these unnecessary details to make it seem like a more believable story," says Lyn van Swol, a social psychologist at the University of Wisconsin who coauthored the study.

Here's one allocator who had $30 to split and offered the recipient a measley 10 bucks:

"I'm giving you $10," he said.

"Ten bucks? So they gave you $20?"

"It's more than $7.50."

"Yeah. The only thing I'm interested in is if they gave you $30 or not."

"Only if what?"

"The only thing I'd have a problem with is if they gave you $30 or not. And I know you wouldn't dick me over, so ... And of course, we'd all figure this out later."

BUSH: The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

Q: What did Iraq have to do with that?

BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?

Q: The attack on the World Trade Center?

BUSH: Nothing, except for it's part of—and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a—the lesson of September the 11th is, take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq. I have suggested, however, that resentment and the lack of hope create the breeding grounds for terrorists who are willing to use suiciders to kill to achieve an objective.

PALIN: I've read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.

Q: But, like, what ones specifically? I'm curious.

PALIN: All of 'em, any of 'em that have been in front of me over all these years.

Q: Can you name a few?

PALIN: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news too. Alaska isn't a foreign country, where, it's kind of suggested and it seems like, "Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C. may be thinking and doing when you live up there in Alaska?" Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.

By comparison, in the experiment, this is how a conversation went when an allocator told the truth:

"Um, so I was given six dollars and I decided to just split it evenly," he said.

Recipient: "Fifty-fifty?

Allocator: "Yup."

Recipient: "Pretty fair."

Allocator: "Yeah."

Even Anthony Weiner, when he finally came clean, managed to, um, keep it short: "Last Friday night I tweeted a photo of myself that I intended to send as a direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle."

The Harvard study also found that liars tend to be more profane, which the researchers say is because they're so focused on their lies that they don't stop to control their language (see: Weiner), and that they also frequently speak in the third, rather than the first person, in what the experts say is an attempt to deflect attention from themselves. Next, they're going to look into how well people detect lies on email.

Of course, excessive wordiness isn't a surefire tell that someone's lying," says Harvard Business School Professor Deepak Malhotra. It "might just remind you to be a little more inquisitive," he says.

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